GATA: World Gold Council to teach central bankers how to trade gold
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To Clarify and To Obfuscate The Truth:
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But just how is the ‘strong dollar’ policy implemented, except by suppressing gold?
Submitted by cpowell on Wed, 2013-02-13 19:41. Section: Daily Dispatches
Nobody in political authority or journalism ever asks.
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Obama’s Treasury Pick Says He Supports Strong U.S. Dollar
From Reuters
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/13/us-usa-congress-lew-dollar-idU…
WASHINGTON — Jack Lew, President Barack Obama’s pick to run the Treasury Department, on Wednesday said he would support a strong U.S. dollar, in line with longstanding U.S. policy.
“Treasury has had a longstanding provision through administrations of both parties that a strong dollar is in the best interests of promoting U.S. growth, productivity and competitiveness,” Lew said during a hearing vetting him for Treasury secretary, in response to a question.
“If confirmed, I would not change that policy.”
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World Gold Council to teach central bankers how to trade gold
http://gata.org/node/12234
Submitted by cpowell on Wed, 2013-02-13 15:34. Section: Daily Dispatches
10:44a ET Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Central bankers will be taught how to trade gold at a three-day seminar on “gold reserves management” to be held in March at the University of California at Berkeley and co-sponsored by the World Gold Council.
Apparently modern “gold reserves management” involves a lot more than making sure that the metal is safe in a vault, even if whether and how a central bank should account to the public for its gold trading do not seem to be subjects for discussion at the seminar.
But at least one of the seminar’s lecturers may know something about how a central bank can keep the public ignorant of its market interventions: Kenneth Sullivan, senior financial sector expert with the International Monetary Fund, the organization whose secret March 1999 staff report found that Western central banks conceal their gold loans and swaps to facilitate surreptitious market intervention:
http://www.gata.org/node/12016
Sullivan, the seminar’s announcement says, is the IMF’s representative on the International Financial Reporting Standards Advisory Council and chairs central bank accounting study groups addressing issues of transparency in central bank financial reporting. That must be a frustrating job for anyone really pursuing transparency.
The seminar itself doesn’t seem to be pursuing transparency. Its invitation is limited to “senior central bankers — governors, deputy and assistant governors, heads of reserve management, economists, and portfolio managers,” and “finance ministry officials and treasury managers.”
So will the World Gold Council explain to the gold mining companies and gold investors it purports to represent exactly what are the objectives of central banks trading in gold and the gold futures, options, and derivatives traded for them by their agent, the Bank for International Settlements? Is the objective to maximize the value of gold at the expense of government currencies and government bonds or maximize the value of government currencies and government bonds at the expense of gold?
And if, with the seminar, the World Gold Council isn’t actually facilitating central bank manipulation of the gold market, why keep the public out?
The seminar’s announcement is posted at GATA’s Internet site here:
http://www.gata.org/files/UCBerkeley-WGCSeminar-2013.pdf
And at the World Gold Council’s Internet site here:
http://www.gold.org/events/berkeley
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
Click to access UCBerkeley-WGCSeminar-2013.pdf
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Secret IMF report: Hide gold loans and swaps for market manipulation
http://www.gata.org/node/12016
Secret IMF report: Hide gold loans and swaps for market manipulation
Submitted by cpowell on Tue, 2012-12-11 04:53. Section: Documentation
11:58p ET Monday, December 10, 2012
Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:
Western central banks conceal their gold loans and swaps because information about them is “highly market-sensitive” and accountability about them would hinder secret currency market interventions by central banks, according to a confidential report by the International Monetary Fund obtained this week by GATA.
The report, provided to GATA by its researcher R.M., was written in March 1999 as the IMF staff proposed to strengthen financial reporting standards for central banks. The report shows that the objections by gold-lending central banks were decisive in weakening the standards. While the first draft of the new reporting rules would have required disclosing central bank gold loans and swaps, the revised rules, later adopted, allowed central banks to hide their gold loans and swaps within their gold reserves and even not to disclose the amount of their monetary gold at all, just the value assigned to it.
That is, the explicit but secret policy of Western central banking toward gold is to deceive and manipulate markets, as GATA long has complained.
The confidential IMF report says that to strengthen its financial reporting standards for central banks — its Special Data Dissemination Standard reserves template — IMF staff members consulted top officials of the organization as well as the Bank for International Settlements, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the German Bundesbank, the Bank of France, and other European central banks.
“Central bank officials,” the confidential report says, “indicated that they considered information on gold loans and swaps to be highly market-sensitive, in view of the limited number of participants in such transactions. Thus, they considered that the Special Data Dissemination Standard reserves template should not require the separate disclosure of such information but should instead treat all monetary gold assets, including gold on loan or subject to swap agreements, as a single data item. They also confirmed a view, taken by a number of countries (both inside and outside the G-10) at the December board meeting that the disclosure of the composition of reserves by individual currencies would be market-sensitive but that they would have no objection to disclosure of such information by groups of currencies. …” (Page 6, Paragraph 15.)
“Conversations with a few executive directors confirmed the reluctance of their authorities at present to disclose information on their international reserve positions on a highly frequent and timely basis, as a matter of policy. The motivations underlying this position were: (a) a desire to preserve the confidentiality of foreign exchange market intervention for a period, in order to enhance its effectiveness; b) a reluctance by some monetary authorities to reveal information on their official transactions in exchange markets on a more frequent and timely basis than the disclosure of transactions by major international investors; and c) a concern by some countries that weekly reserves data could be inherently more volatile than monthly data, which could be misleading and potentially destabilizing to exchange markets. This position had stimulated, during the December board meeting, a lively discussion of the costs and benefits of increased transparency under various circumstances and the information requirements for well-functioning international financial markets.” (Page 8, Paragraph 20.)
Specifying changes to be made in the reporting standards proposed by the IMF staff, the confidential report says: “On the assets side of the template, the major changes are: a) the elimination of any requirement to disclose the amount of gold loans, and of the explicit requirement to disclose the volume of monetary gold. The revised template would require only that the total value of monetary gold (including gold loans) be disclosed.” (Page 8, Paragraph 23.)
The confidential IMF report confirms and elaborates on the Bank of England’s admission to GATA a year ago that the bank’s gold swap and leasing information is “market sensitive” and its disclosure “would allow enquirers to find out what gold transactions have been taking place.” Such knowledge of what the bank was doing in the gold market, a spokesman for the bank said, would harm the interests of both the British government and the bank’s “private customers,” to whom the bank “owes a duty of confidentiality”:
http://www.gata.org/node/10635
While disclosure of the confidential IMF report is unlikely to prompt any acknowledgment from the most determined purveyors of misinformation in gold market analysis and the mainstream financial news media — nothing is likely to get them to be truthful — it will enable individual investors and citizens to confront their central bank and elected officials and ask more authoritatively for an accounting and explanation of the purposes of secret central bank gold loans and swaps, transactions in which even the U.S. Federal Reserve is participating, according to a statement extracted by GATA from a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors in 2009:
The confidential IMF report on the authorization of secrecy for gold loans and swaps is posted in PDF format at GATA’s Internet site here:
http://www.gata.org/files/IMFGoldDataMemo–3-10-1999.pdf
CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.
Click to access IMFGoldDataMemo–3-10-1999.pdf
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Gold Council Sees Central Bank Bullion Buying at 48-Year High
By Nicholas Larkin – Feb 14, 2013
Central banks added the most gold to reserves in almost a half century last year as prices averaged a record, the World Gold Council said.
The banks bought 145 metric tons in the fourth quarter, an eighth successive quarter of net buying, the London-based industry group said today in a report. They added 534.6 tons to reserves last year, 17 percent more than in 2011 and the most since 1964, it estimates.
Nations from Brazil to Russia are adding the metal to reserves at a time when investors are holding a near-record amount through gold-backed exchange-traded products. Bullion gained for a 12th straight year in 2012, the best run in at least nine decades, averaging $1,669 an ounce through the 12 months.
“We think that the current rate of net central bank purchasing, driven by emerging countries, is likely to continue to be very strong,” Marcus Grubb, managing director of investment research at the council, said yesterday by phone from London. “This is very much due to a desire to diversify away from over-reliance from the dollar and the euro.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Nicholas Larkin in London at nlarkin1@bloomberg.net
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http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2013/2/12_Nothing_Is_Real_In_Markets_Any_More%2C_This_Will_End_Badly.html
Nothing Is Real In Markets Any More, This Will End Badly
Egon von Greyerz told King World News that when it comes to markets, “… nothing is real.” Greyerz, who is founder of Matterhorn Asset Management in Switzerland, also believes we are seeing a sucker’s rally in stocks.
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G7 nations pledge to coordinate their currency market rigging
G7 nations pledge to coordinate their currency market rigging
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/12/us-g7-forex-text-idUSBRE91B0IF20130212
G7 reaffirms commitment to market exchange rates
LONDON | Tue Feb 12, 2013
(Reuters) – Following is the text of a statement released by the G7 nations on Tuesday.
“We, the G7 Ministers and Governors, reaffirm our longstanding commitment to market determined exchange rates and to consult closely in regard to actions in foreign exchange markets.
“We reaffirm that our fiscal and monetary policies have been and will remain oriented towards meeting our respective domestic objectives using domestic instruments, and that we will not target exchange rates.
“We are agreed that excessive volatility and disorderly movements in exchange rates can have adverse implications for economic and financial stability. We will continue to consult closely on exchange markets and cooperate as appropriate.”
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Oops! We were TOO TRANSPARENT!
To Clarify and To Obfuscate The Truth:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/02/13/us-g7-forex-idUSBRE91A0FS20130213
Britain’s central bank chief riled by G7 mixed messages
By Clare Hutchison and Lidia Kelly
LONDON/MOSCOW | Wed Feb 13, 2013 8:53am EST
(Reuters) – A Group of Seven statement designed to cool international currency tensions should be taken at face value and anonymous officials should not try to reinterpret it, the Bank of England’s chief said on Wednesday.
Currency markets were thrown in to turmoil on Tuesday after a day of mixed messages about exchange rates, prompted by Japan’s new government pressing for an aggressive expansion of monetary policy, which has seen the yen weaken sharply.
G7 nations – Britain, the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and Canada – said fiscal and monetary policies must be directed at domestic economies and not at targeting exchange rates.
Japan quickly said the statement – released by Britain which chairs the G8 grouping (G7 plus Russia) this year – gave it a green light to continue efforts to reflate its economy.
But a G7 official responded by saying it was aimed squarely at Tokyo, a comment that prompt the yen to surge on a volatile foreign exchange market.
Bank of England Governor Mervyn King said the statement should be taken at face value.
“When countries take measures to use monetary stimulus to support growth in their economies, then there will be exchange rate consequences and they should be allowed to flow through,” King told a news conference.
“In the short run if you want to allow countries to stimulate growth, you have to allow them to take the measures of a monetary or other kind which will have consequences on the exchange rate, and we should let floating exchange rates take them where they will.
“When I put my name to that statement yesterday, I didn’t expect that other so-called officials will be out there giving unattributable briefings … trying to claim that the statement said what it didn’t say.”
Russia, chair of the Group of 20 nations, said it was important that Japan had not intervened on currency markets to weaken the yen.
“The Japanese yen was definitely overvalued,” Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak told reporters, ahead of the G20 meeting in Moscow on Friday and Saturday.
Germany said the statement should draw a line under debate for now.
“I’m very glad that we have hopefully concluded the question of exchange rates for now … which all G7 members accepted and I hope the G20 will also accept,” a German government official told reporters.
A source familiar with the discussions that led to the release of the G7’s first statement on exchange rates since 2011 said the off-record intervention may have been prompted by irritation that Japan had responded so quickly to say it had been given a clean bill of health.
ALL EYES ON G20
As a result, discussion at a G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers in Moscow at the end of the week may be more heated than previously expected with some concern about the pace at which the yen has fallen.
But officials said it was unlikely that Tokyo would face any sanction.
“To me the statement says – as long as price action is smooth (G7 officials) are not going to do anything. So I stand by my point that we are going to have more yen weakness in the medium-term,” said Vasileios Gkionakis, head of global FX strategy at UniCredit in London.
Japan’s top financial diplomat said his government will tell the G20 that its push to revive the economy with aggressive monetary expansion will benefit other nations and outweigh any possible negative effects.
“We share the view that each country should put their house in order by pursuing appropriate monetary, fiscal and structural policies and that would be the best contribution to the global economy,” Takehiko Nakao, vice finance minister for international affairs, told Reuters in an interview.
U.S. and European officials have been concerned about comments from some Japanese officials that suggested Tokyo was targeting a specific level for the yen.
“You don’t depreciate your way to growth whatever country you are,” British Prime Minister David Cameron told parliament.
But U.S. Treasury official Lael Brainard said on Monday that while competitive devaluations should be avoided, Washington supported Tokyo’s efforts to reinvigorate growth and end deflation.
The U.S. Federal Reserve, like the Bank of Japan, has created vast amounts of new money to bolster its economy.
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